


just one burst of light

by stellarer



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil
Genre: Canon Era, F/M, Ghosts, Mild Religious Themes bc JVJ, Notfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 03:48:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5651419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellarer/pseuds/stellarer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cosette dies. Marius can see ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just one burst of light

**Author's Note:**

> the english librettist sure wrote a lot of lines for marius that have to do with ghosts

When Cosette is twelve, she dies.

It's like her consciousness is pulled, syrup-slow, from her convulsing body, and for a while she thinks it's a dream. But Valjean is sobbing beside her bed, and she can't wake up, and she is weightless.

"It’s good to see you again, Cosette." The voice is familiar in a distant way. There's another person in the room with them--well, not a person; a brilliant tangle of blue-white lightning, and Cosette knows suddenly who it is.

"Maman!" 

Fantine wraps her up in a ghost-hug, lightning spooling out to wrap around Cosette.

Valjean calls the doctor and the priest into the room, and Cosette yells and screams and pulls away from Fantine to whirl and try to hit them or anything to get their attention. “They won’t notice you,” Fantine says. “No matter what you do.”

Cosette throws herself against the wall and passes half-through it before she catches herself. “What am I supposed to do, then?”

“You can stay here, around people who are still alive, and places you recognize,” Fantine says, “Or you can come with me, and we can be somewhere else entirely. Nobody still alive, nobody who can’t see you.”

"If I stay here, can I go with you later?" Valjean is going to be so alone. He’s still crying. Cosette needs to make sure he's okay. At least until he gets a new kid or something.

"It's not a permanent choice. I can visit you, you can visit me." Fantine says. “You're not stuck. You have choices.”

Eventually, Cosette and Valjean are left alone with Cosette's corpse, and Valjean prays.

—

Marius has always been able to see ghosts. As a kid, an only child who is often left alone in a large house, it's nice to have friends who can hang out without his grandfather arranging a whole evening where their families can eat a stuffy dinner.

They're about as common as living people, and in general, much more friendly. The ones that aren't interested in being his friend just don't make any effort to interact with him. It's very nice. He has friends who live in the house and friends who he sees when he goes into town. His grandfather scolds him for talking to himself, but Marius does it anyway.

Ghosts don’t have faces or bodies, but they have their own ways of communicating. They have voices, and they get brighter or dimmer, change color and shape and size. They can’t move objects and they don’t cast light, despite seeming to be made of it.

—

He’s a young man, recently moved out of his grandfather’s house and good graces, befriending reluctant thieves and revolutionary republicans, when he sees her. He’s in the street by the park with Éponine, who is smart and street-savvy. Marius is distracted from their banter by a man who is being followed closely by the most beautiful ghost he’s ever seen. She’s all loose lightning wrapped around a spiky shadow, and when she notices him, she pauses for a moment, the shadow-spikes growing curiously.

Marius is light-headed—that was a moment, they just had a _moment_ —and realizes he spaced out on Éponine.

“I just saw the most incredible woman in the world.” He sounds faint to his own ears.

“There haven’t been any other women past here in an hour,” Éponine says.

Well, Éponine wouldn’t have seen her. “Trust me. She—she went that way, with her father, towards Rue Plumet. Éponine, find out where she lives, please? She’s with an old man—”

Éponine makes a noise of disgust, but the kind that means she’ll indulge his idea, no matter how bad she thinks it is. “Sure thing, Marius. You owe me, though. No, not money, fuck you.” And she’s off, sprinting after the woman and her father. He doesn’t have a concrete way of knowing that the man is her father, but he knows it; sometimes, ghosts are just like that.

—

In the musical, Cosette has a whole song about how her life is small and stifling and Valjean is keeping secrets, but in this story, 1. she can hear every time Valjean talks out loud to himself about his past, which happens a lot, and 2. she’s not actually alive. Instead, Cosette meets up with some of her ghost friends and gossips about the cute alive guy who “totally could see me, no really, I swear.”

—

Marius realizes he’s probably late to the Amis meeting, rushes to the café. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Joly says, and Marius responds, “A ghost, you say?” trying not to laugh, because nobody will understand why it’s funny. He tells his friends all about the beautiful woman he saw, even though important revolution decisions are being made—what’s more important than love, after all? This is the most amazing day of his life.

Éponine finds him that evening, a scrap of paper with an address written in her functional, clear hand. “I didn’t see the woman, but that’s where the old man went.”  
When Marius goes to the address, he finds her, and she remembers him, and he’s very flustered but it’s _perfect_.

(Éponine isn’t actually present to hear or see (or not hear/see, in the case of Cosette), so she sings the accompaniment to a heart full of love with the understanding that Marius has found his Dream Girl Who Is Totally Alive.)

Cosette hasn’t met a living person who can see ghosts before. Fantine visits occasionally, and Cosette has ghost friends who she meets regularly; she’s not lonely. Marius is new and fascinating, and Marius really likes her, and she finds that she really likes Marius as well.

Valjean chooses that day to start worrying about being discovered by the law. He buys a ticket for a ship to Britain that leaves the next day. For the first time since she died, Cosette realizes she’s not going to follow him.

—

Éponine shows up at the barricade, disguised as a boy and ready to fight. Marius recognizes her, because that’s her luck, and gives her a letter for his mystery woman, because that’s also her luck. She delivers it, though, because Marius is important to her. The old man answers the door at the house on Rue Plumet, and try as she might, she can’t convince him to let her deliver the letter to his daughter. Valjean is kind of really confused and shocked, standing there like “wtf, my daughter is dead,” but she insists, and he can’t bring himself to have that conversation so he tells her, “you have my word that my daughter will know what this letter contains.” Éponine figures that’s the best she’s going to get, and she goes back to the barricade where she can be useful instead of delivering letters for hopeless crushes.

Cosette is in the garden when Valjean gets the letter. When Éponine leaves, he takes a deep breath that sounds shaky, and begins to read. He does this fairly often; he talks out loud, not knowing that Cosette is there listening, but hoping that she can hear him from some heaven. Cosette reads over his shoulder and listens to him read it and doesn’t regret her decision not to go with him; she’s stayed by his side for years, and she loves him, but she likes Paris, and she likes Marius.

—

Turns out, Éponine was prepared to die. As Marius holds her, she pulls free of her body, watches him for a moment. Nobody is there to welcome her to being dead like Fantine was for Cosette, so Marius explains that she’s a ghost and there’s some other plane of being too, if she wants to try that out for a bit.

“I can't stay,” she says. “You don't have to,” Marius says. “I’m not leaving for whatever heaven bullshit you’re talking about,” she says, “I’m just leaving you.” She intangibly pats his hair with a lightning-tendril, and then she’s by Gavroche’s side before Marius can ask why she seems _bitter_.

After that, Marius watches each of his friends leave their bodies, one by one. Each one tries to keep fighting, and each one fails to actually interact with the world, and some of them take it pretty badly.

Marius gets shot and lingers on the verge of death, flickering between feeling pulled out of his body and being too much a part of it. Valjean, reasonably curious about the man writing love letters to his dead daughter, is searching for Marius with only the knowledge that he’s a revolutionary student and a giant sap. He finds him, because Marius is very clearly identifiable as a sap, and rescues him, because that’s what you do to the guy who thinks your dead daughter is the light of his life.

—

When Marius wakes up, Valjean is there. “So I got a letter the other day,” he says. “Are you aware that Cosette is dead?” and Marius is like “....so I can see ghosts” and Valjean is like “oh dang you tell Cosette all this stuff about why I’m on the run from the law” and proceeds to tell his entire life story.

Marius listens very attentively and tries not to smile at Cosette as she interjects things like “Knew that. And that. This is very sweet, but I could hear every time he prayed out loud? He talked about this stuff a lot. And I’ve been talking to Fantine? I think I know more than he does, actually.”

—

“Empty chairs at empty tables,” Marius sings, the only live person in a room full of ghosts.

“You can still see us and interact with us, what the fuck,” Joly says.

Marius is like “I can hear them now--the very _words_ that they had sung,” glaring at Joly, who is laughing with Bossuet now.

“My friends, don’t ask me what your sacrifice was for,” Marius says, just trying to mourn the fact that they can’t change the world like they wanted to, while the friends in question keep interrupting him snarkily.

“Maybe if you had payed attention in meetings, you would know--” Enjolras as a ghost is very spiky, or maybe that’s just reflective of his mood right now.

“I know your _reasons_ , I know what you said, but you can’t deny that your deaths kind of didn’t accomplish those goals.”

“Okay, Marius, it’s a little too soon to say stuff like that, some of us are still very upset that our revolution failed.” That’s Grantaire, gesturing at Enjolras, abrasive as ever.

—

When Valjean dies, Marius and Cosette are visiting him. Marius acts as a go-between, relaying what Cosette says to Valjean; but as Valjean gets closer to death, he begins to see and hear Cosette.

Fantine shows up, which Cosette expected, and so does Éponine, which is a surprise. Marius is happy to see her again.

Valjean decides to follow Fantine—it wasn’t ever a question, really. He’s lived for a long time, and he’s very religious, and he’ll see Cosette again some day.

**Author's Note:**

> bishop myriel makes a day trip back to being a ghost to marry marius and cosette. fantine and valjean are there. eponine is a bridesmaid for both of them. marius is the only living person in attendance. they waited until valjean was dead so that he could be a part of the ceremony. 
> 
> eponine starts hanging out every so often with cosette as well as marius, and they’re all friends.


End file.
